Ava Maira

Ava Maira is a staff writer of Marginalia. She obtained her master’s degree in English literary research from Nottingham Trent University in 2025.

Poster of the film Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery by Rian Johnson.

Grace for the Guilty

Ava Maira / February 6, 2026

Detective fiction and religion may appear to be polar opposites of one another – one an exercise in fact-finding, the other in myth-making – but in reality, they are both modes of storytelling that are chiefly concerned with mystery and truth.

Photo of the book The Daylight Gate by Jeanette Winterson

Spectres of Other Histories

Ava Maira / January 30, 2026

Haunting is the fundamental literary gesture of the Gothic as a genre, and its horrors can be a way of exploring the ghosts of the past that haunts our present.